The Spark

February 06, 2005|By KATHLEEN CAHILL Kathleen Cahill is a writer and playwright who lives in Willington. For Northeast, she last wrote ``Running Blue'' on Dec. 5.

He is sitting in the window seat beside me on a four-hour flight home. He's middle-age, not terribly attractive at first, although as we talk, I start to enjoy his smile and want to be amusing to make him smile more. We are surprised at how much we have in common: It turns out we went to the same college, that we're both from working-class Catholic families in upstate New York, we're both returning home to New England from a visit with our grown children and grandchildren who live in the West. We talk for the entire flight. During the last hour, when he talks, he touches my arm.

My husband is on the other side, in the aisle seat, asleep. We've been together for 26 years, married for 22 of them. I know him better than anyone else in the world. But in this cramped, temporary, unexpected moment, I like talking to this man on my right whom I don't know at all. There is something between us. I remember this feeling. The feeling of being an undiscovered country and an explorer at the same time. The feeling of attraction. It's not a great, burning, flame of desire. It's just a spark. I look out the window. We are flying above clouds, above the weather, above our routines, our disappointments, our responsibilities. We're in a temporary heaven of possibility brought about by the seating assignments of Delta Airlines. And from such accidents, comes the spark. It's nothing; it's everything. The little flash, the Big Bang of human experience, the spark that lights the match, that ignites the fire that we try to keep going for the rest of our lives. And usually fail. I've read that the spark in the average relationship lasts about three years. Ask Jennifer and Brad.

If the spark is where the fun begins and ends, how does anyone keep the fire going for a lifetime? Does this moment on an airplane with a stranger mean that my husband and I need to see a marriage counselor as soon as we land?

And by the way, what do marriage counselors really know about marriage? About the ups and downs of long-term relationships? All they ever see are the downs, not the ups. All they hear is ``the conversation with the flying plates'' as Lorenz Hart wrote in the song ``I Wish I Were In Love Again.''

It turns out they know quite a lot.

Dr. Leslie Lothstein, head of psychology at the Institute of Living, points out that in the beginning of relationships, women and men have the same sex drive. ``It's a bonding attachment process. Evolutionary, and emotionally powerful. Both of them want it to continue, but it's hard to maintain, and after about three years, it retreats into the background.''

But not everybody jumps ship after three years. Some people stay together for decades. There are children, and the patterns of a shared life. And then suddenly, in their 50s, they break up. Dr. Lothstein says, ``They've been together for twenty-nine years, and tell me they do everything together -- watch TV together, go on vacation together, see friends together. They do everything together but have sex together. Then suddenly one of them wants out and the other is completely surprised and shocked and left in the lurch. I hear it so many times: I love my husband, or my wife, but I'm not in love with [them].''

``Men at 55 or 60 are narcissistically vulnerable,'' he says. ``They get attracted to younger women in their 30s. The aim is sex and the sex is great, but the young women have another aim in mind: They want a family. So at the end of the wild affair and the exciting sex, a guy finds himself changing diapers at age 65. It wasn't what he had in mind when he fell in love again.''

Wisdom from The Beatles: ``If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true, and help me understand, 'cause I've been in love before and I've found that love is more, than just holding hands.'' But maybe love isn't much more than ``holding hands,'' as well as other parts of the body. Science is starting to identify the components of love, and the day may come when, instead of ``you turn me on'' we may feel compelled to say ``my neural peptides are in a froth over you.''

Oxytocin is the primary neural peptide which activates feelings of tenderness, closeness and nurturing. As couples therapist Dr. Brent Atkinson writes, ``oxytocin makes women feel tender and intimate, and interested in having sex. For men, oxytocin levels peak during orgasm, which may be why women often enjoy the company of men most during the ``afterglow'' period following sex. Due to the release of oxytocin, men are most naturally motivated to act in nurturing ways after sex.''

Though the oxytocin might be marching to a different drummer in men and women, ``sex is the primary place where they are equals,'' says Dr. Barbara Lynch, professor of marriage and family therapy at Southern Connecticut State University. ``You don't have sex with your inferiors or superiors. In the old Jewish religion, they used to require couples to have sex once a week, in order to remain equals.''